Linux is struggling on the desktop because it only has a small number of "great" apps, according to the Gnome co-creator. Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the Gnome desktop, told tech journalist Tim Anderson at the recent Windows 8 Build conference "When you count how many great desktop apps there are on Linux, you can probably name 10," de Icaza said, according to a post on Anderson's IT Writing blog. "You work really hard, you can probably name 20. We've managed to p*** off developers every step of the way, breaking APIs all the time."

When comparing applications on different platforms, many people forget about whether the app is free or even open source or not. You can't be serious comparing a product of a bunch of free software developers to the one made by a horde of programmers of some software publishing house.

Well, there are exceptions, like gimp. Apart from missing a number of quite important features photo professionals use, it is an excellent app that can stand to being compared to Photoshop. And it is completely free, while Photoshop is not!

Now, if we look at photo management software, Shotwell is good and it works. Looks like Picasa, perhaps more like version 1.0 of Picasa. That's it. You can't even compare it to the latest Picasa, not even mentioning Adobe Lightroom.

Now, if there's Picasa for Linux, why isn't it on the Linux (i.e. Ubuntu) desktop by default?